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Robert Naiman wrote: > If it is outrageous to say that everyone opposed to Assad is a stooge of > US imperialism, is it not also outrageous to say that everyone opposed to > US imperialism is a stooge of Assad? Yet it is among those denigrating the struggle against Assad that we find the outrageous lies about what is going on, the denial of the mass slaughter by the Assad regime, the denial that anything is going on but a proxy war, the denial that there is any democratic content in the struggle. There is nothing anti-imperialist in this slander of the masses, and it is outrageous to cover that up. Those who are actually opposing imperialism are supporting the struggles of the masses for basic rights and are opposing the Assad dictatorship and other dictatorships. Real anti-imperialism is based on supporting the struggles of the masses for freedom, whether the masses are our own political trend or not. It means realizing that the road to more radical political stands has to pass through the democratic struggle, even though the outcome of that struggle may be quite modest or disappointing these days. There are some supporters of the democratic struggles in the Arab Spring who were overoptimistic about where these struggles would go - for the example, Trotskyist theory of "permanent revolution" led in the direction of either denouncing various struggles of the Arab Spring or fantasizing about what they might achieve. But it is nevertheless the case that it is among the supporters of the mass struggle that one will find the most realistic assessments of the situation, far different from the fantasies of the backers of Assad. Thus it is not a question of either anti-imperialist or anti-Assad. The two sides aren't whether one is anti-imperialist or whether one supports the democratic struggle. Now, no doubt, many people are skeptical of the struggle against Assad because the political forces they believed to be anti-imperialist are opposed to it. Moreover, they see both many liberals and much of the supposed radical left agreeing in denigrating this struggle. They may not even have access to the views of those leftists defending the Syrian masses, while they see prominent figures from the past, figures who they trusted in the past, denigrating the Syrian masses. But the conscious political forces that oppose the struggle against Assad, and the prominent political forces that oppose it, are not anti-imperialist. Some, lilke Workers World, do so because they fervently back one imperialist bloc against another, and they don't judge the struggle by what the masses are doing, but by which outside powers they support. Meanwhile a section of liberal opinion denigrates the struggle against Assad precisely because they believe it isn't in what they call US interest, and this standpoint has been put forward in certain articles in the New York Review of Books. Can such a standpoint be called anti-imperialist in any way, shape, or form? Is it so hard to see that when the liberal bourgeoisie talks of "US interest" it is talking of "US imperialist interest"? _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
